~ Mark Steyn
We've all seen the bumper sticker in question. I've also seen it scrawled inside airport bathroom stalls and in graffiti on freeway retaining walls. "9/11 was an inside job."
The stunning stupidity of this statement is beneath debate to any thinking person, but it has recently become such a pop culture tagline that it deserves to be addressed--with brain cells firing.
As Mark Steyn rightly points out, if we lived inside a government that actually perpetrated such atrocities against its citizens, it is hardly likely that we would be allowed to roam the country trumpeting that fact. It's far more probable that the shiny black boots would be kicking in your door at midnight, if you sported such a bumper sticker within such a regime.
This raises another question that challenges the logic of the "inside jobbers." If you lived in such an oppressive system, wouldn't you want to get out? Wouldn't you be crossing into Mexico or Canada with your flashlight and backpack in the middle of the night, trying to escape the ruthless fascists at the helm in the U.S.A.? Yet it doesn't seem that the 9/11 conspiracy freaks are at all anxious to leave home. They're quite content to stay, arguably to convince the rest of us of the evil nature of our government--but more likely not to miss out on the next Walmart sale or to upgrade their i-Pods.
The "why do they stay?" question prompts yet another inquiry: If our government was such an evil, corrupt, conspiracy-ridden dictatorship, would it allow us to leave? Wouldn't we be stopped at the border, the airport, the train station, and herded off to those highly efficient "re-education camps" that totalitarian regimes seem so fond of? Yet there are uncounted thousands of Americans traveling every day, both in and out of the country, unencumbered--except for that pesky shoe removal at the security check-in.
If "9/11 was an inside job," who would want to live here? As Steyn also notes,
Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.That's good food for thought. Unfortunately, the "inside job" crowd isn't very hungry.
